Saying Hello.

Hello everyone and thank you for stopping by the Able English School weekly post. It’s great to see you. Every week, I’ll be talking about this or that and bringing you interesting stuff from around the Web to help you learn English.

Since this is our very first post, I thought it would be a good idea to talk about saying hello. In English, there are many, many ways of greeting someone and what you say really depends on where you are, what time of day it is and what tone you want to express. First thing in the morning, meeting a friend at the bus stop, you might start with a “Hey, how’s it going?”. At work, though, meeting your boss or supervisor, you might be more formal and say, “Good morning. How are you today?”

It can be confusing since there are so many greetings and really, not a lot of rules for which one to use. A good rule of thumb to help you is, the longer the sentence, the more formal it is.

((If you notice there, I put in a link for the idiom, “rule of thumb”. The link will take you to a an article that will tell you what the idiom means, which is, in this case, “a general guideline and not a strict rule”. I’ll do that from time to time – put in links to phrases you might want to look up.))

Well, that’s all for now. Thank you very much for stopping by. And, really, what discussion about saying hello would be complete without a song? Listen to the song, and try to catch all the words. You can find the lyrics here